Damaged
by HVK
Summary: Sierra's a traumatized Gargantuan Ogre changeling; Zim's the Keyblade wielder and captain of their weird crew. On the birthday of her dead boyfriend, they share a quiet moment. Possible future scene in my Kingdom Crossovers continuity.


One of the big crackships I'm planning to do for my big story Kingdom Crossovers is what I'm alternatively calling Zierra, Sierrim or ZASR (which sounds like a laser type); Zim shipped with Sierra in Total Drama World Tour, or more accurately Sierra as a Gargantuan Ogre from Changeling: The Lost. (And with elements of a Seelie Redcap from Changeling: The Dreaming.) She hasn't actually shown up in the story yet, but I see that as no reason not to write one-shots about her, and the rest of the team. (So far, only Zim, Calvin, Hobbes, Morte and Zuko have joined or even shown up. I hope to make progress with that this year.)

Only in this case it's less crackship and me trying to wedge my brain into their potential relationship and see what makes it tick.

Disclaimer: I don't own anything that is not owned by me.

...

The problems with deserts, Sierra had come to know after a certain amount of time spent as a courier in the Mojave Wasteland of Zeerust, was the lack of water. So, if she had known about it at the time, she would have been concerned when, after missing the usual meeting of navigational musing (or more honestly, Calvin and Zim arguing about where to go while Kamina and Marceline put bets on who was going to win this time until Zuko lost his patience and forced the two short guys to pick the less stupid option; Hobbes and Scyala, inexplicably, always found somewhere else to be at times like that) their ship had crashed out of the Astral Plane, rebounded through a Time Lord's bathroom, skidded across a lake in some random suburbia in a insignificant varient Earth long enough to make people panic, passed through an infinite Improbability Field long enough for all them to switch genders for five minutes enough for them to panic over it and freak out over it /ogle over it/not even notice (Hobbes in particular held romancing a hypthetical female version of himself as an ambition) and finally came blasting out of a planar portal sustained by their mass quantity of Spiral Power and landed in a big desert whose chief distinction from most other similar deserts was that it was largely composed of differing landscapes from various points in history and had a number of bizarre man-made buildings, attractions and similar features scattered around like they had been dropped from the sky.

(And also there were dinosaurs. Calvin got very enthusiastic about them, even though he had seen _plenty _of stranger things then giant reptiles and was so well-versed in his personal spark of genius that 'mad scientist' was a job description for him.)

She didn't get her opportunity to throw her two cents into the matter because she had been too busy looking over old pictures in her bunk to realize they had even set off towards a specific destination, let alone realizing that they had arrived there when the ship landed. It was a good fifteen minutes before Marceline came up and knocked on her door to let her know that they landed at wherever they were. (Ever since Morte had been hooked up to a mentally-controlled robot and took over as the main pilot with Kamina as his co-pilot, the constant crashes, imaginary dogfights and tendency to accidentally fly into stars that had been a hallmark of Zim's tenure as pilot were little more than bad memories. Calvin was little better; he was an excellent _combat _pilot, but while he knew how to drive just about anything that came on wheels or flew, he was totally hopeless outside of a dogfight.)

Marceline had seen her crouched over on the floor, an awkward giant of a young woman that just seemed too big to make sense (even at a relatively petite height of seven and a half feet; being a sizeshifter was unpredictable and a bit frustrating, Sierra had concluded, no matter how much fun it was), pictures of a younger teenage boy laid out all over the floors and walls in an eccentric pattern that looked a bit like a fractal. Marceline, dressed in a full-body coverall jumpsuit that protected her from sunlight, took it all in a single look, and she didn't say anything about the sight of it or the strangeness or Sierra's strong resemblence to the more worrying kind of stalker (and the other kind were bad enough); Marceline already _knew_. She just gave a half-smile; Marceline was perhaps one of Sierra's best friends aboard the ship, and they knew a _lot _about each other. Like Marceline said, '_We monster girls gotta stick together, know what I mean_?". Sierra didn't, actually, but she appreciated the idea, and they shared a lot, and so Marceline knew _exactly _what Sierra was going through and was nice enough not to draw attention to it.

She just floated over, gave her a pat on the shoulder. "We're here," she said.

Sierra blinked miserably. "We left?" She shook herself out, lamenting how out of it she was. "Where are we?"

"I dunno, some kind of multidimensional and temporal nexus of blah-blah-blah, science-words and technical words that I just know they're making up, yadda yadda _BLAH_." Marceline shrugged. "I was taking bets. Not really listening to the midget science-guy and Captain Glorious Schizophrenia-Hero argue about where we was actually going."

"Huh." Sierra anxiously pushed a picture slightly sideways into the proper alignment as dictated by whim. It had to be right, it _must _be right, it had to be _perfect _and be everything that was good about his memory...

Never forget, she told herself. Never forgot anything bad that happened to you, even if it was your legs knee deep in meat that writhed and bit or blistering imaginary deserts that were still real and baked your skin into leather or the faeries slicing your face open and leaving you to stitch a big happy smile from ear to ear, or watching your precious one _die _and knowing over and over and over that he'd still be alive if it wasn't for you, remembering that it was his death that ripped a hole in your mind that Arcadia poured it's insanity down into you were a monster too and everything had gone all wrong and _it was all your fault._

'Keep your memories close', she'd heard the changelings of the Winter Court whisper in their boltholes and shelters and fortress-cities. 'Remember the Sorrow. The Fair Ones can't take the grief out of your heart no matter how deep they dig, they can't find out why we cry even if they slice up our faces and put our tear ducts under microscopes, and they can't take away how bad we want dead people to come back again, so you keep it close and safe no matter how bad it hurts. It keeps you sane and your clarity clear.'

Sierra was a changeling of the Dawn Court, the Court of change and possibility. Hope was her power, the emotion that fueled her Glamour and birthed her dream-magic, the fuel storming under her skin and coursing through her muscles and eating up all the bad things inside when her true stature came shooting up, and in a way remembering the miseries of the past fueled that Hope; it was good to make herself remember that she had something to fight against, and that a terrible past lay behind a dozen potential futures full of goodness and peace.

She had to fight, even if she hadn't had other things besides his memory to fight for. She was an Ogre, after all; she was literally made for surviving, and fighting, and _winning_. It was what They had made her into.

Marceline was talking and Sierra snapped out of her thoughts. "-So anyway then I found the leeches, no idea what the hell they were for, so I stuff them under Calvin's transforming-machine-thingie for laughs and BAM! They go and turn into giant scaley things with laser eyes and magnetic breath, but they also got giant freak-brains so they're super-smart and they want rights. So I cut 'em a deal to do some work around here until we find a water planet or whatever and drop 'em off to colonize the place or whatever."

"And Calvin didn't mind?"

Marceline snorted. "He thought it was the most awesome thing he saw all day. Then he saw the dinosaurs."

Sierra blinked. "Dinosaurs?"

"Long story, but I hear the place is lousy with 'em." Marceline gave the wall an impatient tap. "C'mon out and see. Staying up locked up in your bunk isn't healthy." She paused, reflected, and added, "Depends on the circumstances, though."

Sierra bit her lower lip. With teeth like hers - a jagged and serrated collection of deadly shapes with some like a shark's and some like a seal's and others that looked decidedly dragonish and still others that had no mundane equivilant in any history she knew of, and it didn't help that they kept regrowing in new and weirder shapes everything one of them got chipped or whatever - she should have shredded up her lip something awful. Thanks to the mysteries of changeling physiology, all she got was a mildly prickling sensation. "...Marcie?"

"Yo," Marceline said easily.

Sierra almost pulled back on the question, wanted to choke it down and pretend she hadn't ever thought of it, but impulse and drive where the fundamentals of her mind, so she just blurted out, "When we get back to the universes we got lsot from and you find your Finn, Bubbegume and Flame Princess, what are you wanna do when you get them?"

Marceline gave Sierra a measured look, her teal eyes shifting to a deep shade of red in a blink of a second. Her hair grew longer, trailing down fron the instep of her shoes and noiselessly sliding down to the ground. Waves of thousands of strands ceaselessly pulling against each other in border-frenzy turned her hair into a chaotic and beautiful ocean of blue-black that perfectly constrasted the reflective look on the vampire's face.

Marceline grinned then, two charmingly long incisors poking just over the outer swell of her lower lip, points dimpling the flesh. "Grab the three of 'em, head for my bunk, lock it up and then make up for lost time."

"...You mean play video games?" Sierra said, trying to be coy. "Watch TV?"

Marceline smirked. "Yeah, maybe a little bit. My love-buddies and me do love our video games and TV is, like, our _thing_. Used to watch movies at a movie club all the time." She shrugged. "Everything else is up for grabs, wink wink, nudge nudge, so on and so forth." Marceline chuckled more than a little longingly.

"At least you have that to look forward to!" Sierra sighed, with a small smile; she was a born romantic, and couldn't help but appreciate the love of others when she saw it.

Marceline raised an eyebrow. "Jealous that I got my own little harem, or jealous that the guy _you're _after has the attention span of a dead buffalo and wouldn't notice that you're into him until you give him a good smack upside the head and tell him? And then you'd have to dumb it down on and on until it turns out he doesn't even get the concept of romance?"

On that, Sierra was silent.

Marceline waited for a moment. "The Boss-guy _does _like you, you know." Sierra looked at her uncomprehendingly. "Oh, come on. I _know_. The two of you are so obvious about it." She smirked. "Look on the bright side. His culture has him predisposed to dig taller girls."

"Just don't tell him that, he'll think you're talking about shovel-murder," Sierra remarked, without rancor or bitterness.

"And then he'll argue with himself about whether that means murdering with a shovel or trying to murder _a _shovel and then he'll start arguing about the semantics of murdering an inanimate object and whether it counts or not."

The conversation came to a stop when Marceline finished; Sierra had resumed staring at the pictures, lost in thought.

Marceline spoke again, picking up on the giant woman's feelings. The room had tinted itself with bitter sorrows, too many regrets to stomach even for someone with eating-based powers, and certainly resonated with heartbreak. "...Anniversary?" She asked delicately, gesturing from first the pictures and then a small calender.

Sierra shook her head. "Birthday," She said.

Marceline thought that over. "Yours?"

Sierra shook her head. "Nope."

"Ah, I get it." Marceline gave her a long look. Sierra wasn't sure what it meant until she recognized the look on her face as a rare moment of empathy. Eventually, Marceline gave Sierra another pat on the shoulder, floating up to reach her and the gesture more awkward than before. "C'mon," She said, tugging a bit insistantly on the bigger woman's shoulder. "Let's go see where we're causing trouble today."

Sierra let herself get pulled up to her feet; she was a giant, even if her usual stature was measured under ten feet, and though Marceline was _strong_ Sierra didn't have to let herself get moved around by her so easily if she didn't want to be. Just, all the same, it was too much pain to bother herself about that too much.

The vampire steered the giant out of the room, allowed her to grab just one picture and stuff it into her pocket, and into the outside.

...

Sierra had, again, been displeased with the desert situation. Like all relatively sane changelings, her memories of her torments in Arcadia were more impressions and flashes than anything cohesive, but she did have powerful dreams of toiling at the claws of a fae dragon inbetween the experiments that bored True Fae had inflicted on her before setting her loose in nightmares dug out of the skulls of dead and insane vagrants to see how the modifications had taken, and the dragon's domain had been the Dessicated Wasteland, a theoretically infinite expanse of desert that was the apothesis and archetype of all things desert-y; craggy mountains and blistering heat, terrible monsters and savage beasts bigger than buildings and all hungering for the moisture of her blood, and the other nasty things you expected from a inhospitable desert only with all the dials turned up to eleven. (And also man-eating parrots the size of dinosaurs. She wasn't sure why they'd been there but she now harbored a universal loathing for parrots.)

On the bright side, this particular desert wasn't too bad; her second impression of it was that it was really more of a savannah that had been having a few bad seasons, and in fact they had floated right over an oasis with a lot of ramshackle and abandoned buildings that Sierra supposed had been built by people who had learned too late that the dinosaurs were man-eaters. (She noticed a particular skeleton with withered fingers still clutching a sign that said 'DON'T SELL THE DINOSAURS GUNS, YOU FOOLS'. She hoped he'd died with some satisfaction at being right.) Zim decided to use that makeshift town as their base of operations, since the oasis was right there and all, and they could probably stake out individual buildings to use for themselves and some other things that he decided weren't that important because he started arguing with his figments, at which point everyone had stopped paying attention. (Sierra had, though; as a changeling and naturally attuned to the chimerical essenses of the Dreaming, she could see other people's imaginary things. Her habit of animatedly talking to things that didn't technically exist had not done much for perceptions of her sanity.)

Things had gotten more on track after that; Morte helpfully informed her that this place was one of those 'nexus between times and spaces' deals, a land where lost things inexplicably ended up (and appropiately dubbed the 'Land of The Lost' on the database); dinosaurs and buildings and ships from history were the least of the weird stuff they'd probably find here. Calvin, their resident supernatural physicist and expert in dimensional sciences, figured they could exploit it's nature and use it to make a portal back to at least _one _of their universes of origin, after which it would be a simple matter to navigate back to Traverse Town again, meet up with their allies and figure out what to do from there.

Yes, their ship could portal and shunt through universes; it was also _still _traveling and didn't really teleport, it still had to move through distances metaphysical though they were. After an extremely unfortunate incident regarding a moon goddess with a lousy sense of humor, they'd been thrown halfway across the universe and more than six months had passed without any of them seeing anything that was even slightly familiar. (Except for Morte, but he was _really freaking stupid-breaking old_, he'd probably seen the universe be born three times or something.)

Sierra hoped it would work this time; she kind of wanted to meet Zim's friends and find some of her old friends that had moved to Traverse Town. (Okay, people she knew; Courtney didn't like her very much and she wasn't sure that she had ever actually spoken to Beth but Beth didn't dislike her so she _totally _counted as a friend.)

Sierra endured the rest of the discussion, zoning out a lot and staring at a giant purple bat with yellow polka dots moving around on it's fur and six ducks sitting on it's back while quacking out the Canadian national anthem. While she tried to figure out if the bat-and-ducks were real or just some random chimerical thing she happened to notice, the others made up their own orders due to the crew's incredibly lax view of leadership-by-commitee: Kamina, Marceline and Scyala volunteered to take one of the tanks to the boundaries of a jungle they had spotted several miles from their current location and see if there was anything cool there and at least pick up something to eat on the way back (beneficient for both of them; Scyala liked studying new and strange plants, and Kamina got to drive a tank), Calvin wanted to scope out the area and get a better grasp of the forces at work in this plane of existence and Morte decided to help out, Hobbes and Zuko were happy enough to patrol the area for dangers, and Zim was interested in investigating the buildings for potential scavenging. Sierra, still staring at possibly imaginary things, neglected to join in on the debate and they eventually left her be after trying to get her attention with little tricks like poking her with a stick or splashing her with water or throwing a small dinosaur at her before they gave up and left her alone at Marceline's suggestion.

Many things fade and, frequently, Sierra's attention span was one of the high-runners in that category should anyone ever decide to make a list of them. She lost interest pretty quick and looked around to see that everyone else had gone. The crew's usual procedure was to split up and scout out a promising area whenever they landed somewhere, so she was used to this (and generally it included arguing about petty semantics, a monster attack or two, and at least two explosions once Zim got bored, so the lack of unneccesary excitement was pretty encourging), so she decided to follow the crew's standard operating code, which was paraphrased as 'go do whatever until we need to team up', and wandered off to find something to do. She didn't notice Zim studiously watching her with something like faint concern and other emotions that were frankly extremely new for him.

The town wasn't very large and the buildings soon thinned out, and Sierra wandered over to a scrapyard filled up with a variety of cast-off machines, strips of beaten metal, hollowed out vehicles and other things the former inhabitants of the town had apparently dragged in before their demise at the hands of dinosaurs. Sierra wondered, her thoughts more lucid than was normal for her, how the people who lived here had enough time in this presumably dangerous world to get a scrapyard but not realize that the dinosaurs were carnivorous. A rumble in her gut dismissed the question, and a creative impulse swelled up at the sight of the scrap quelled potential musings.

Sierra had learned many things in her time in Arcadia, little scraps of power invested in her by merit of becoming a human version of the immature and insane gods of the fae; many of the little tricks and powers she'd acquired were expansions on things she'd known as a human, and she didn't remember exactly _where _she'd learned how craft simple chimera in the forms of machines and devices and similar objects and do it in such a way that it was actually quite similar to what Calvin deemed mad engineering. And somehow it all came from her family heritage of basket weaving.

It never made any sense when she told people about it, Sierra thought as she crouched down and began digging through the metal. _You can't make engineering out of weaving,_ they said. _It has absolutely no relation to each other, _they said. _And anyway the stuff you makes keeps trying to get me to call my mother or eat my socks_, they said. Sierra understood it intuitively; it was all about weaving disparate elements together, synching up different things from different origins and tying them together with dream-essence and story-logic, drawing from the stuff of emotions to remake those fundamentals into true wonders. Her basic powerset revolved around growth anyway; this was all about making the potential in assembled objects grow until they were _real_, she supposed.

Very little of the things she could do made any sense. She just rolled with it.

She leaned deeper into the scrap, growing more excited as possibles came forth unbidden in her mind; the phantom images of armored motorcycles and crude mechanized armor suits and living mechanical creatures appeared to her, and all those things would be so _useful _in a place like this even though she didn't know how long they would be there, and the more she thought about it a mechanical creature would be useful to have around; they could get it to help them fight or hunt down food, and maybe it would become intelligent and she would have made a new friend, and Sierra would have one more piece of evidence to rub in Calvin's face for her theory that her chimerical power to create things was really midwifing them into the world, pulling in ideas from the Dreaming and shaping them with the things of the material and giving those ideas the light to live in the World for a time and _holy crap that gutted motorcycle chasis would make a PERFECT torso for a four-legger_.

Sierra hauled it out, a motorcycle with most of it's internal components gone, the front wheel a burned mess and everything behind the seat totally gone, and she began industriously clearing the excess things off to either be reused on something else or abandoned entirely, digging nails so thick and strong as to be claws into corroded and bent metal sheets until the metal bent and gingerly pulled the sheets away, exposing vulnerable mechanical innards. Sierra cooed and whispered pleasant nonsense, as if surgically administering to a frightened child - "_Shushies, now, momma's gonna make you all REAL and stuff_," - and took bit after bit off the chassis. A twisted headlight, the front wheel, and so on, though curiously she kept the seat on. She had a compelling mental image of a low-slung riding beast made of machines and spirit, and so the seat absolutely _had to stay_.

She went to her works, hands moving with practiced but jerky speed, half-looking posessed by whatever idea she was channeling into the world.

When the chassis was picked clean and ready to be the foundation of her creation, Sierra wasted no time looking for more things to add, settling on finding something to make a skeletal structure, having images of a creature that moved on all fours with a same sort of sloping sprint cats used, and thought that perhaps a series of reinforced ball-bearings and hinges might work and make it quite flexible, but at the cost of making it fairly fragile. That seemed unacceptable and even endangered the prospective creation, and she instead pulled out the lower quarters of a dismembered labor-robot from the heap, removed everything except the hips, and those she added to the rear of the chassis in such a way that they rested high, connected to it by a series of overlapping and flexible plates Sierra secured over a thick cord the robot had probably used as a central processor (mounted in it's spine, though). She selected some parts and discarded others, seeming incredibly picky at times and all too willing to jam everything she could get her hands on into the thing; gradually a frame began to appear around the chassis until it looked more like a ribcage with the rest of the body growing around it. The cord, for example, connected to a set of broad and limber shoulders in the cat fashion Sierra had seen earlier, made from a makeshift pulley system and several abandoned prosthetic limbs Sierra had elongated by unraveling them and connecting them to each other until she got a set of unusually thick forearms armed with broad dextrous fingers that would be equally adept at locomotion and manipulation. She thought for a moment, and after a few minutes of quick work involving several metal plates and tire-less wheels from a monster truck, created a set of two steel-belted wheels that she attached to the rear of the creature, hooking them up to it's hips in a short assemblege that would allow it to move the tires organically, and just as she intended the large tires would function as crude legs for when it wanted to stand up straight.

She dug back into the heap to find something should could use for a heart and apply to a rough circulatory system she had made into the core muscle groups (the 'muscles' being pistons and steel fibers she had woven up) and didn't find anything, so she took the steel sheet from earlier and took a massive bite out of it. Her teeth and improbably strong jaw muscles bit through it like it was made of paper, and it made an interesting crunch under her wickedly sharp molars. The sharp edges of the metal would have cut her throat and mouth to ribbons if she were normal, but she was definitely _not _normal, and all she felt was a minor ticking on the inside of her cheek and when she swallowed. Her stomach accepted the chunk of metal and grumbled approvingly, her peculiar form of digestion that might be better called matter assimilation occuring instantaenously.

The metal tasted pretty good. She took another large bite, the ravenous and eternal monster's hunger that drove her half-insane most of the day quieting to a mere persistent ache. The hunger wasn't too bad today, Sierra thought; on one _really _bad days, she had wandered into an alley and eaten a entire garbage can in a single gulp (her jaws ability to unhinge _exactly _enough to get down whatever she was swallowed really helped), swallowing in the process seven thick magazines, a broken printing machine, four rotten apples, a dead wallaby, and a very unfortunate rat that she hadn't noticed scrounging for garbage before it overwhelmed her and all she could do was lie down on the ground whimpering and crying until the pangs stopped. (And then resumed two hours later but was frankly halted due to a change wandering onto a garbage barge. It was rough being a changeling.)

She heard the sound of dirt crunching behind her. Before she could offer anything more than a befuddled 'hrm?' the sheet of metal bent sharply, clapping onto her face with a forceful but harmless clanging noise. She ripped it off her face and looked around, pouting at the short and stocky person standing behind a tree with an arm bent in a aggressive martial arts kata.

"SNEAK ATTACK!" Zim yelled, wiggling his arms with a crazy grin before he walked over to her, conact lense-sheathed eyes narrowed in gleeful amusement, his shaggy wig-hair crammed under a red military-issue cap that clashed horribly with the green longcoat-and-cargo pants ensemble he had chosen to ear today.

"Beh?" Sierra said.

"I have been told that sneak attacks do not work if you shout them. So I shout them _after _I make the sneak attack. THIS IS HOW TACTICS WORK."

"Really? Cool," said Sierra, finding this perfectly reasonable. She picked up the metal, weighed the merits of eating it. She noticed that the right forearm was a bit wobbly at the elbow, so she bit down on the metal and ripped off a jagged chunk, spitting it out before nibbling on it more carefully, biting around it until she eventually chewed out a very small and thin gear that she set into place in the joint between several other gears that would hopefully help to absorb the shock of physical exercise.

Zim watched her with great interest and soon walked over to a short distance near her to see better, his metal-shod boots stamping down on the ground with greater force than was strictly required.

He didn't say anything, so Sierra chose to assume that Zim had been satisfied with announcing his presence in his usual fashion by trying to irritate the living hell out of someone. Sierra blissfully thought it was adorable and resumed her work. Still looking for something that might work like a heart, she commented, "Your Metalbending's getting better, isn't it?"

"I suppose so," Zim remarked. "Don't say that in front of Zuko, though. He has been becoming more tetchy about calling the stuff I do bending." He shrugged, as if to say that it was no real deal to him. The powers the Keyblade conferred onto Zim were weird enough that any pre-existing label didn't fit right, but it was easier than saying 'the elemental powers Zim can suddenly do'.

Sierra snorted. "He's such a total purist. We need to get him into reading web comics and see if he gets into it! That'd be fun!"

Zim actually shuddered. "And have the fandom do something mad like shipping him with the comics creator? You speak madness, woman!"

"Oh come on, like that would ever happen."

"OH yes it would! Zuko's man-prettyness is such that eclipses that of both you and Marceline and overwhelms the senses of all who behold him; the fangirls would go _mad _for him!"

Sierra blinked, unsure whether to be intrigued that Zim had called Zuko man-pretty or annoyed by the rest of it. "Did you just say that Zuko's prettier than me and Marceline put together?" She asked, not as upset as she thought she ought to be. "Oh! What about Scyala?"

Zim stared at her. "...Scyala is a vaugely anthropoid reptilian from a race of sapient saurians with dragonish qualities. I am in _no _way qualified to judge her attractiveness in relation to anyone else."

"Ask Hobbes how pretty she is," Sierra suggested, grabbing a rusted radio and prying it apart to see if there was anything salvagable. Alas, there was not. "Hobbes is, like, dating her or something."

Ignoring the minor issue that with a ship as small as their's they ought to know if Hobbes was dating Scyala or not, Zim snorted and said, "Hobbes is also romantically and sexually attracted to every single sentient female I have seen in his presence that is not evil. I am not prepared to take the opinion or advice of someone that indiscriminate into consideration."

"Aw, I don't think he just goes for pretty girls, I think it's more like he's worked out how to translate someone's good qualities into attractiveness." Sierra paused. "Wait, did you just say that you asked Hobbes for advice?"

"...No I didn't!"

"You did! You totally did! By accident, which makes it an even bigger deal!" Sierra leaned over, loomed over Zim and grinning. "Come on, come on, what was it!"

Abruptly eclipsed by Sierra, Zim looked unbelievably awkward. Far more than he normally did. "Nothing, I say! THere was no advice! I most certainly did not ask him for romantic advice and anyone who says I did will get exploded for revealing that I asked him for romantic advice." Zim recalled what he had just said. "...Oh, Autochthon _dammit._"

"Does this mean you have to explode yourself?"

Zim glared at her. "No, of course not! That would just be silly." He shifted about uncomfortably. "So!" He said loudly, utterly shameless in his hurry to change the subject. "What is this thing that you're doing? Here, that is the place that is being here!"

Sierra pulled back and changed her position, her broad legs adjusted into a more comfortable position. "I dunno. I got bored and saw this stuff and thought I might make something of it. So far I think I'm making a machine-thingy that's alive, but I don't really know what kind."

Zim considered this. "I will assist you," He said, in that very special way that made it perfectly clear that it was not a request to be allowed to lend aid.

"Really!" Sierra said. "Um. Really?" She tried again, taking care to not sound so eager. "Um. Your metal powers would help a bit."

"Of course they will, everything I turn my hand to becomes an expression of GENIUS!" Zim circled around. "So what shall it be?"

Sierra shuffled about. "Uh...what about the others?" She said, looking around and hoping they wouldn't intrude on what promised to be a Special Bonding Moment. "Did they go off and do...stuff?"

"Yeah," Zim said. "Kamina, Marceline and Scyala went off with a tank and do other stuff but who cares because they got to get a TANK, Calvin and Morte wanted to study the area's SCIENCE, Hobbes and Zuko went looking for things to beat up. I _was _going to study these buildings for repurposing, but you seemed far more interesting than that."

"Oh," Sierra said, trying not to grin. _Yay! _She thought, satisfying herself with a cheery little smug smile that she tried to make look like she had thought of a decent solution for her mechanism problem. "Well, I'm looking for something that could work like a heart to power it's circulation system-type thing." She waved her hands. "Bum ba-bump. That kind of thing."

Zim tilted his head. "Okay," he said simply, and in her chimerical perceptions fire and heat crackled in the echoes of that single word, blazing from him so intensely and unknowingly. Sierra shivered, and it was good; she had known cold and desolation, wastelands without shelter and mercy. Dragon's fire had melted her flesh to mush and rebuilt her in it's own image and sometimes everything still felt so terribly cold, but Zim was on _fire_, blasting purifying heat with every carelessly loving word tossed about for her to scrutinize and devour and plead for more.

She controlled herself, kept it inside. Always hungry, all the time, and the worst of the hungers were more empheral than others.

The two of them searched and didn't find anything that fitted the specifications as is; they _did _find many things - a tiny perpetual motion bellows, for starters - and jury-rigged them together into a mechanical heart a bit larger than Sierra's hand. Zim changed the metal so that it was all one piece, except for the bits that were supposed to move, and the result was a little circulation pump that would never stop beating once it started or was destroyed, assuming the power feeding into it wasn't interrupted, and they hooked it into the core of the chassis, winding the wires of the circulation network into it.

More work came after that; making a rounded skull from a spherical computer and eyes from old cameras and a mouth from a bear trap combined with a more complex jawline system. Enlargening the frame to support that before refining the mechanical muscles, securing the limbs, digging up the metal sheets and breaking them up into articulated plates as a protective skin. Sierra's moved as if possessed, operating with greater speed and increasingly frenzied attitude, and she had absolutely no idea what half of the things she was making and putting into it were for; Zim had enough time seeing them to guess that they were analogues to basic biological systems, so maybe they _needed _to put that sort of thing in to bring it closer to their idea of a living thing. (Sierra had seen the things she had made when they were too far from the basic design; her dreams had given birth to monsters, and even so she still cried when she had snapped their necks in single blows.)

Gradually, a creature was begining to take real shape, still little more than bones and organs of mechanical origin. Tightening the wheels and modifying the joints to make them more flexible, Zim casually spoke again. "This is a reasonably nice place, you know."

"Hmm?" Sierra said. She noticed that the plates on it's high forehead were slightly out of alignment and she pointed this out to Zim; he obliging passed his fingers over them, sealing them up and fusing them into a slightly irregular but whole piece.

"Almost like a resort; there is water available, no nearby neighbors to try and kill us, and we'll likely be here for sometime if past experience is any suggestion." Zim blew into his hands, producing a faint reddish glow. Apparently amused by it, he inflamed it into a fireball and threw it as high as he could just to see it explode. "If Calvin's theories about using the nature of this 'Land of the Lost' to travel back to one of our native universes holds true, crafting a means of exploiting that may well take a while. How would you like to spend some time here? It'd be a bit like a vacation!"

"What we normally do is sort of like a vacation anyway," Sierra said reasonably. She and the others had joined Zim because going with him seemed like fun; Calvin, Hobbes and Morte had been the only ones ordered into it and anyway Zim had made it clear that he didn't consider such things binding. They could leave whenever they wanted, only they didn't want to; their crew was only there because they _wanted _to be there, and accordingly they only did the things they did because they felt like it; the resultant atmosphere was so easygoing and relaxing that it felt like a vacation most of the time.

Zim waved a hand irritatably. "Yes, but this would be _official_."

Sierra picked up a clock and opened it, hoping it would be clockwork so she could use the gears. Alas, it was inexplicably an electronic difference engine with an atomic battery. The battery was still active (having nearly a thousand years to go) so she stripped it out and plugged it into the creature's guts right next to it's heart. She didn't know why, it just felt right. "Sounds fun," she said amiably.

She hadn't even noticed Zim's mild (for him) tension until he let out a short breath. "Assuredly," he said, sounding pleased.

They talked for a while then as they worked on putting the finishing touches on it's innards by reinforcing it's body and maximizing it's joints toughness/mobility and so on, adding a set of smaller wheels to it's forearms. They spoke of nothing important in the long run and tremendously important right then and there; of what colors ought to take like and what the emotional color spectrum _really _meant, of what the very best video games they had gotten where and how they ought to improve them, of what the best way to blow up Hell was in the event that they wound up in the Lower Planes and decided to take the logical approach of their fighting evil thing by destroying the gods of evil (and also the fiends), having some fun determining the entirely hypothetical point of when you exactly had too much firepower (a silly question, of course; you could _always _use more firepower, even when it wasn't physically possible to have any more) and other topics interesting them for the moment, their voices blending and moving in turn with each other like the most inelegant but pretty dance. They were both untrained in it, inexperienced and too wounded to know when the words bled too much, but they tried all the same.

Eventually, irresistably, with the mechanical creature taking form under their minstering hands, their talk took a direction towards a slightly more awkward direction when Sierra asked, "Do you miss your Earth?"

Zim stared at her. "..._Yes. _Don't you miss yours?"

Sierra frowned faintly, and her scars itched. "I...um, I _want _to say that I do. That's what you're supposed to do. And, the stuff I can remember...man, I miss it so much, but I can barely remember anything about it at all. Just little stuff like my country. Nothing, you know, really _real_."

Zim was silent. This was something so rare that Sierra was compelled to fill up the silence with more words.

"I mean, it's not that I don't want to remember, I just _can't." _Sierra's voice choked, and all her scars burned; the ragged marks all stitched up in a ghastly smile from the corners of her dark lips to her ears, the barely healed slashes coating the outline of her muscled ribs, the deep marks around her biceps where the skin had been split open and bigger muscles had been stitched hin, the not-quite-scaley roughness on so much of her skin that was neither scar-marks or the beginings of dragonish spikes; it all hurt right then. "Not after, you know...Arcadia."

"Ah," Zim said quietly, as painfully awkward as only he could be when he realized that he was totally out of his depth and his usual turns of phrase were woefully inappropiate. Sierra smiled sadly and gave him an encouraging pat on the side, her palm neatly capturing the whole of his shoulder. "I am sorry."

Sierra wanted to say that it was all right, that she didn't mind that much. She was just too fundamentally honest to say it. "...Yeah." She shrugged. "I remember some things. The way the snow was so crisp when the weather was just right. Dumb syrup and hockey jokes foriegners made about my country. And my mom-" Sierra's voice broke. "You know what the worst thing is, the very worst thing that like totally rips me up? The Others took the little details about her away. They just reached right in and ripped those memories out. She was like my friend before everything went to hell and she _died _and now I can remember the stuff she did and how nice she was and how fun it was when we got into the same things and I can't remember the sound of her voice or what she even _looked _like." She sniffled. "I miss her. I miss _him_. I miss _home_."

Zim sat down, very quietly and slowly. Sierra heard the faint crunch where his backside met the grass. He didn't have parents, she knew; Irkens made their young in vast factories, or so he'd told her, and the closest thing he had to parents were the leaders of his society. And if what she heard about _them _was any indication, Sierra thought that Zim should be insanely jealous instead of sympathetic. Slowly, he scooted closer to her, moving into her shadow that towered over him even sitting down.

Her claws slid slowly against her fingers until her hands were clasped. A brief and growling sob interrupted anything she might had to say. It hurt so much, thinking of these things on this day of all days, and she finally said, "God, I sound like such a total _kid_." She'd spent five years with the Others and she was still mooning over her mommy like a _baby_.

Trying to make herself feel better by talking all cynical didn't help much at all.

When Zim spoke, he did it with extraordinary precision, as if picking his words out of a vast pool filled with chemicals he was scared of. "I think...I think that I might not understand that _precise _relationship, that sort of thing you humans have, but I do understand about losing important people like that. People that you cannot stomach or bear to have lost. Grief is nothing to be ashamed of." He gave her a look, one that suggested his next statement came entirely from personal experience. "I believe that childishness would be blaming the dead for leaving you, not just grieving for them."

The words echoed, to her chimerical knowledge of the nature of emotion-colored things, with loss. Loss of purpose, loss of a reason to move forward and life, and a grief so all-consuming that it turned all too easily towards vengenance even with nothing to direct it towards, and at least it turned inwards into self-loathing, and from there into understanding, and then uneasy peace.

Sierra dared to smile at him. "Yeah. I, uh, I kinda get what you mean."

They sat there in companionable silence for a time. They occupied themselves with finishing the creature's innards, polishing up a digestive tract even though they weren't sure what it would eat, adding a secondary thinking engine near the root of it's hips and putting in a whip-like prehensile tail for balance and manipulation.

Thoughts of today's date kept bubbling up, and Sierra thought that if nothing else, Zim was someone she could talk honestly to, without fear of being mocked or misunderstood. They had too much in common to have that sort of problem. Eventually, too distracted to tend to the task at hand, she said, "He would have been eighteen today."

Zim was running his hands along their creation's frame, sealing it's vulnurable organs inside it's shell, the metal seamlessly closing at his touch; metal was the element of self-improvement and resilience, and those came quite naturally to him. "'He'?"

Sierra withdrew a picture from her pocket and flipped it around so Zim could see: a teenage boy with poofy brown hair and a shameless grin revealing a missing tooth, built short and slight, and greatly contrasted by Sierra herself in the picture; at least five years younger than the Sierra Zim knew but evidentally a few years older than the boy, she was shorter and skinnier than Zim knew her, though this was not saying much; still the same dark skin and curvy body type, unaltered and not as pronounced by the chaos of Arcadia. She was only a few heads higher than the boy she had wrapped in a friendly headlock and pinned to her chest (perhaps the reason for his grin), her smile filled with crooked teeth different from the monster's-fangs Zim knew, her body mostly unscarred and whole. Her hair, Zim noted, was longer even in a braid, and a more vibrant shade of purple. Unexpectedly, Kamina was in the picture as well, green-tinted red eyes tinted further by the crazy sunglasses he wore, grinning widely and holding his two friends in a fierce bear hug like they were family, and nearly as tall as Sierra, and he too was less scarred than ZIm knew him. (For one thing, he didn't have the spirals in his eyes, the bizarre living tattoos or the machiney implanted in his body.)

Sierra gestured at the short, younger boy. "Cody," she said simply. "He was...um," she fidgeted and blurted. "Kinda-sorta totally-almost my boyfriend! I think." She blushed, wishing for a moment that she could be sure exactly _what _they had been to each other. "He was sixteen when we took this picture; right after Kamina's brigade from them busted me, Cody and our friends out of this evil reality TV series." She thought for a moment, waiting for Zim to point out her age discrepency - that was less than two years and Zim knew she'd spent five years in Arcadia - but then she remembered that she had told him that the five years in Arcadia had been less than a few months outside Arcadia. The time in the land of Faerie was seriously weird. "Today was Cody's birthday. So...he would be have been eighteen today."

Zim frowned slightly. Under his wig, his antannae wiggled in distress. "I am sorry," he said again, looking awkward and embarrassed and not having the slightest idea what the hell he was supposed to say. "...Dib's birthday would have been a few weeks ago. I sat there and looked at the wall and thought about what we would have done if everything hadn't fallen apart. Gone interviewing yetis or going to space for space sodas and alien bunnies, I suppose." He faltered even as he said it, perhaps aware that there was a great difference between someone who was missing and the missed birthday of someone who was dead. Sierra didn't see much difference, though; there was just mutual pain here, and the sharing made it better.

"...If it was me and Cody," Sierra said. "I think we would have gone and eaten out at a pizza place and played video games. Probably gone to go see a movie or spend a day at the beach or steal an experimental military weapon to trick Quebec into seceding so we could take it over and declare ourselves soveriegns of it so we could institute better guidelines for dub imports."

"A truly noble endeavor." Zim coughed and he eventually said, "Kamina was your friend then? Does he know about...the unpleasantness of your backstory after you left the group?"

"That Cody died?" Sierra shook her head, her massive braid bouncing slightly against her back. "That'd be fun. 'Hey, Kamina, I got news! Remember when me and Cody went off to do other stuff? Turns out we got beaten up by a homunculus made of wrath, Cody got killed by him and then they sold me to the Others for something stupid!'"

"Hrm," Zim said. Sierra reflected that Kamina _had _been somewhat downcast today, having only yelled at six inanimate objects for no reason, so perhaps he did know. She closed her eyes; knowing that one of her few friends at least suspected that she had lied to him only made her feel worse.

Sierra felt movement, and her eyes opened wide when Zim scooted right into the great outward curve of her hip, his much smaller body fitting snugly with her's. He looked embarrased, confused, awkward, a bunch of other little things that reminded her of being back in school and liking boys and never knowing how she was supposed to approach them and it always got screwed up somehow. Remembering what it was like to be too big for herself and ungainly made her smile at the sight of Zim's unrelenting assertiveness that was so counter to his child-like size, and she gingerly moved an arm around his side, effectively eclipsing hin and pinning him even more to her.

He twisted in surprise and heat flashed from him in reflexe, but it didn't hurt Sierra, and neither did he make any attempts at all to move away.

Dark lips quirked up in a smile. "Thank you," she said quietly.

"What was that?" Zim said.

"Nuffin'."

They didn't say anything for a short time, just sitting there and holding each other, mutual survivors cracked and broken at the seams and held together by hope and sheer bloody-minded stubbornness. And even with the differences like Sierra's obliviousness to the pain and Zim's incandescent fury at a multiverse that just wasn't noble enough for his liking, it made the smilarities stand out more. Zim said, "You know, after my Earth-" he stopped. With a visible effort, he tried again. "After those monsters came to my Earth and...did what they did and Dib and Gir and everyone else went missing and I woke up in Traverse Town, I was too confused and bewildered to really process the thing. So I did some fighting and stuff and I found out that I was in the middle of a big cosmic conspiracy or something like that. It took my mind off the whole 'missing people' thing for, I don't know, about fifteen minutes. I had to deal with the whole thing on my own and make up my own plans on how to rescue them or even if they could be rescued or if they were even alive. And later, people told me that I'd get over the grief, that the cliche 'hole in my soul' feeling would scab over."

"So what'd you do?" Sierra asked uncertainly, knowing the feeling as well as she knew Zim's tone of sarcastic bitterness.

It was a bit hard to see him under her bulk, but she thought that Zim had a unhappy smirk. "I found out that those people were straight-out _lying_," he said miserably. "I didn't just 'get over' losing Dib and Gir and the rest, I spent weeks and months before I understood that they were _gone _and if I didn't go and bring them back to Aang and Danny and the rest than I would be a failure as a person pretending to be good. It never stopped hurting, it never got feeling any better. There wasn't any finality, because for me they _aren't _dead, they're just lost somewhere." He hesitated, and suddenly buried himself fully into Sierra' side in a desperate hug. "...Miss them."

She hugged him back. "I know," she whispered back.

They both understood that when it came to the lost and the dead, you never could get over that sort of thing. You either found a way to get them back or you accepted the grief, and either way you never left that cold and wounded place you moved into when they left you. You just learned to live there, damaged and broken as you were.

They both knew they were damaged. Zim with his lingering nostalgia of the Irken Empire even with the knowledge of how monstrously rotten and hollow it had been down to it's materialistic consumerism core, the certain knowledge that the annihilation of his Earth and nearly everything upon it was partly his fault (for he had been instrumental in building the device that had brought the planet-killing horrors of the Ultimate Darkness there) and not least the knowledge that it ultimately rested on him alone to end the horrors because he alone held the Keyblade and if he failed everyone would die and it would _all be his fault_. Sierra with the lingering horrors of a place made from nightmares and twisted dreams ruled over by mad faerie gods who delighted in murdering people's souls for no reason, and the tortures she half-remembered only in nightmares (in as much as she actually recalled mostly ignoring the things they did to her and suspecting that they kicked her out of sheer childish spite), the grief she had felt so sharp time and time again, and the fundmentally broken nature of what they had made her into; she had met cosmic horrors beyond the kin of even the maddest nightmares and they had _broken _her, remade her in their image and cast her aside to make an interesting foe for themselves.

They were both damaged almost beyond repair. Like called to like, and at the very least they had each other to sooth the worst of it. And, at least for the moment, that was enough.

Eventually, reluctantly, the two of them parted and finished the task they had set before them, fashioning a crude and disturbingly organic-looking skin from black rubber and pulling it over the creature's body. They worked more quickly than before, skillfully working in a synchronity they hadn't previously demonstrated, and soon the creature seemed almost alive, a finished creation wrested out of Sierra's dreams, a weirdly beautiful oddity just waiting for that spark of life to be truly born.

Sierra held out her hands. "Power, please," She said, placing them down on the still creature's chest.

Zim put his hands over her's, so much smaller than her than his palms barely covered more than a third of her hands. He concentrated, pulling on the power fused with him, and whiteness tinged with green and violet surged out of his hands and into the metal, not quite lightning or light or any energy so easily identified but simply power, undifferentiated and pulled straight from the Keyblade (and Zim had his share of scars from learning how to do that). Sierra wreched ahold of it's as it passed through her hands, the power not so different from changeling Glamour and the emotional energy thereof; she infused her own Glamour into it, pulling and directing it as the energies mixed and thrusting it into the core of their creation. Not into the heart or circulation or any identifiable system but into the creature _itself_, into the pure Platonic _idea _of it, infusing it's theoretical existence with the energy of raw power and possibility folding into one-

The creature's eyes flashed, just once, and it jerked up onto it's feet before it slipped back down onto it's belly in a decidedly uncoordinated movement. It yelped, voice distinctly female (and Sierra wondered how female-ness entered into the picture at any point). Sierra and Zim sat perfectly still, watching and wait as the creature looked around with her mechanical eyes blinking dolefully with the same wide-eyed and slightly stupid incredulity of an infant, unsure of what to make of it.

It slipped again, and squeaked helplessly. Sierra reached forward to help it up. "It's alive!" Zim cried out. "It's alive...it's alive..._IT'S ALIIIVE!_"

"She," Sierra corrected, she and the creature stared at Zim. The creature blinked slowly.

"I have always wanted to say that," Zim said smugly.

The creature stared at him a bit longer, presumably from pure novelty, and then she peered up at Sierra cluelessly, instinctively grasping her forearms out of a simple communal desire. "Hi there," Sierra said brightly. "I'm your mommy!"

The creature squealed. Sierra wasn't sure what that meant so she felt perfectly justified in assuming it was an undying expression of childlike love. Or it had gas. The two sounded pretty smiliar.

"Congratulations," Zim said wryly. "We have created an artificial lifeform that _doesn't _immediately want to destroy all life as we know it."

"Those are just statistical anomalies," Sierra said, 'hmph'ing. "Nowhere near as common as sensationalists would have you believe!"

The creature hauled herself off, pre-recording thinking engine data coming to life and it hauled itself off, testing it's wheels and begining the process of any thinking lifeform in working out just what the hell it was supposed to do with itself. Zim and Sierra watched proudly.

"That's pretty cool, what we did," Zim said, grinning widely at the creature, now inadverdently doing wheelies.

"Yep," Sierra said, pleased with Zim's growing enthusiasm for the whole thing. "So! What were you asking Hobbes about again?"

She would later insist that Zim's spit-take could be heard for miles. Hobbes collaborated this. (Marceline claimed this was also the case, but on the other hand, she was known for never telling the truth when she could make up something more interesting.)


End file.
